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There’s an extensive story from the New York Times’ Weisman and Stolberg today about the aggressive use of anecdotes by House Republicans to feed media and public perceptions of Obamacare’s “failures.” It flows, they say, from a more general strategic decision made earlier in the year to switch the focus of a divided GOP from policy development to “oversight,” which meant, of course, finding Fox-worthy material about Obama policies and then blowing it up into phantasmagoric, monstrous shapes via the shadow-shows of investigations and charges.

If it’s good enough for Benghazi!, I guess, it’s more than good enough for Obamacare, where the relatively small number of people who are actually going to “suffer” can be inflated into the stuff of national nightmares.

Democrats are trying to respond with their own positive anecdotes about Obamacare, not to mention such snooty elitist tactics as facts and logic. But in Anedctotageddon, the GOP has a big head start and the added motivation of having nothing else to offer.

Ed Kilgore
is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Find him on Twitter: @ed_kilgore.

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